Being able to close sales fast is, well, important! It isn’t always enough just to be able to close a sale. Any business can close sales. What should separate your business from your competitors is your ability to close sales much faster than they can, with no faffing about and no dilly-dallying. By closing sales fast, and not just by being pushy, you’re clamping down on the number of dropouts you would otherwise suffer with. To help your business do better, here’s four ways you can close sales faster, and how marketing automation can help!

What Is Marketing Automation?

Before we move on, let’s elaborate on what marketing automation actually is before delving into how it can help close sales quicker. Marketing automation is most commonly associated with software that helps to automate administrative tasks such as keeping track of customer data, analysing how they use your site and the like. But you can also use it to automatically post on social media, send regular planned emails and more. In a sense, marketing automation consists not only of software but of tactics as well such as B2B automation and Ecommerce automation, allowing businesses to build and maintain loyal customer bases. It does not necessarily ‘perform’ marketing for you, but rather helps you to scale your current marketing efforts in a way that you can find and nurture leads quickly.

So how can marketing automation help close sales quicker than any other method on the market today? Here’s four different ways:

Building Close Relationships
At the heart of closing sales quickly is the ability to build client relationships effectively. Once you build a close relationship with a client, you can not only sell to them but also potentially anyone they are connected with as well. There is simply a tremendous opportunity to be had from building close relationships with clients, and building them quickly as well.Marketing automation helps you build close relationships with dozens of potential clients at a time because you can use it to personalise and schedule emails. Let’s face it, we all have only so many hours in a day to get work done. It wouldn’t be the best use of our time sending out emails to prospective clients for hours on end, would it? Instead of spending hours, why not spend a few minutes instead by automating emails in a way that seems authentic? So not only are you saving time in sending emails, but you’re actually improving the process—you’ll never get a name wrong by forgetting it, and you’ll never forget about a particular email you were going to send.

The Convenience Factor
Like we said above, time is a valuable commodity, not only in regard to yourself and your business but also your prospective clients as well. One simple way to close sales faster is to provide convenience that the clients will not be able to find elsewhere. This can come in the form of digital contracts, timely communication, and quick (and compliant) access to data. If you think that sounds good, marketing automation is for you.What is especially great about marketing automation is that you don’t even have to be technologically inclined in order to understand and use it effectively. Whether you have just started using a computer or have been using it for your entire adult life, marketing automation can appeal to everyone due to its simplicity and ease of use. With just a few simple clicks you can send personalized emails to prospective clients, set up meetings, check invoices, and much more. Think of how much more convenient that is for both you and your client than trying to keep track of things yourself.

Lead Scoring
Another way of closing sales quickly is by using marketing automation to score your leads. With a CRM platform, you can score your leads based on different metrics: pages viewed, forms submitted and the like. Those potential clients who spent loads of time checking out your ‘About’ and ‘Services’ pages and seemed to really engage with your site will be graded higher than someone who only filled out the required sections of your form. You could focus more time and effort on those leads more likely to convert, or offer something special- maybe a discount- to low-scoring leads to entice them into engaging a little more.

Tailored Landing Pages
CRMs aren’t just good for analysing data and sending emails. You can use them to create custom-built landing pages without the need to resort to expensive IT pros (which is great if you’re operating on a shoestring). They come set up so that your platform automatically processes data on how people interact with them- put simply, you’ll be able to find out what works and what doesn’t, and make changes accordingly, or even do some A/B testing. How does this help you close sales? It means you’ll be bringing in better and better leads, and engaging potential clients more than ever before. That’s going to have a great knock-on effect further down your sales funnel.

Now, aside from closing sales quicker, marketing automation is great for helping your business grow into the productive and efficient behemoth you’ve always wanted it to be. You can use it to have instant access to client and employee records, keep track of employee performance, and schedule social media and email all in one place. So, more than anything, marketing automation is going to help you close sales quicker by giving you clarity: letting you focus on one thing at a time, and put your everything into everything you do.